A Head Master Writes - The Sunday Times blog by Andrew Halls
A blog by Head Master Andrew Halls is being published on The Sunday Times’ website. Subscribers to The Times Online can click on the link from the Parent Power page of the Sunday Times.
Why are fewer girls attending all-girls schools?
For the first time since 2008, the numbers attending independent schools have risen, if only by a tiny amount. However, the muted good news disguises some darker trends for the independent sector. Boarding schools have been quietly making up a slow decline in UK numbers by fishing in an overseas pool – so much so that some UK-based families now turn to leading day schools to provide the balance and diversity that they once expected from a boarding school. To be part of an international pupil body is clearly a great thing – but if your son or daughter is the only one in the dormitory whose first language is English, then you may begin to feel anxious.
However, in the last few weeks, the focus has moved to girls’ schools. This follows the comments by Ralph Lucas, editor of The Good Schools’ Guide, suggesting that traditional girls’ schools are undergoing a “gradual decline”. Girls’ schools have an impressive ability to counter with prompt robustness anyone bold enough to question their success. The moment Lord Lucas’s comments hit the press, girls’ school heads were mobilised to assert that all was well in their world. The 1.4% drop in numbers among the 174 members of the Girls’ School Association was explained away as part of a general pattern of “consolidation.” In human terms, that 1.4% means nearly 1300 girls lost from their school rolls in one year: by no means a catastrophe in such difficult times, but if it is part of a trend, then an alarm call, nevertheless.
In fact, girls’ schools offer a superb education, and I am very pleased, as a parent, that my two daughters have been so happy at all-girls’ schools. But at a time when only 5% of schools in The Good Schools Guide are now boys-only, they are bound to come under growing pressure. The worst response to this is to attack schools that teach both boys and girls. My own school, all-boys up to the end of GCSE, admits about forty girls each year into the Sixth Form. These girls come to us from over twenty schools across the whole of west London – both state and independent. Many girls’ school heads accept this as one of the challenges of the marketplace and respond to it with their own initiatives. Others, however, frequently complain that “boys’ schools” are “poaching” their girls, “stealing”, or “creaming off” their best students.
I always find this vocabulary unsettling – not because of what it says about boys’ schools that now admit girls, but because of what it says about the way they see their own girls.
Girls’ schools are rightly proud of the sense of empowerment they give their pupils: the ability to distinguish between appearance and reality, to think for themselves, and to make up their own minds. Why, then, do some feel that the moment a girl exercises that independent mind, and makes what may for her be rather a brave or difficult choice, she has actually become a listless victim of forces she is too feeble to withstand?
Our choice of vocabulary often betrays our real thoughts. To speak of intelligent, often feisty and determined young women who make a personal decision to move school at 16 as purely passive beings, capable of being “creamed off”, “taken” or “poached” – like dumb woodcocks caught in traps – denigrates the girls they fight for. Far better would be to ensure their girls know that within their own schools they are sure of outstanding pastoral care, an exciting games and activities programme, first-rate higher education guidance, and dedicated, inspirational teaching. Most girls’ schools provide exactly this, and they are right to be proud of all they achieve.
The best girls’ schools, like the best boys’ schools, will flourish for many years to come – but to suggest that the exercise of free will is, paradoxically, a form of passiveness, is not fair to the girls whose cause they otherwise espouse so formidably.
Andrew Halls
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